![]() ![]() Julia, Bridie, Dr Lynn and all of their patients are real in their humanity and their flaws. This book is a magnificent piece of fiction. Her loss for Julia (and the reader) is compensated partially by Julia’s spontaneous adoption of the newborn son of an impoverished woman who died of the flu. ![]() Bridie becomes ill with the flu and dies. Nurse and volunteer become attached under the continual life and death struggles they face. Julia and Bridie face seemingly every complication of pregnancy with the occasional help of Dr Lynn. ![]() There is a constant flow of new patients onto the tiny ward. (The virus which causes the disease was not discovered until there was an electron microscope in 1935, and a vaccine was not developed until 1938.) There are two other supporting characters: a young volunteer, Bridie Sweeney, from a Dickensian home for orphaned children, and Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a real person, who violently opposed British rule, was Sinn Fein’s director of public health and founder of a free clinic on Charlemont Street. Through staff illness she has been assigned a tiny, three bed ward which is occupied by women in the late stages of pregnancy, and who have the fearsome disease which is taking so many lives. ![]() Nurse Julia Power, age 30, single, who lives with her younger brother, a shell-shocked casualty of the trenches of World War I, is the principal character. ![]()
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